Monthly Archives: July 2002

more money for teacher’s salaries. 20% increase for education in exchange for vouchers/school choice. if you’re willing to work, a middle class society a common sense society; a middle class society: a society where if you work hard and play by the rules you can become a member of the broad middle class education, health insurance a decent home or apartment in a safe part of town with places for kids to play. Krugman parable of fishermen and gold prospectors
bringing backcommon sense, we’ve really got to reform our legal system.
de-meme-ing society; clean smart tough and kind; a middle class government; a common sense government, a government with American values: optimism; work ethic and the golden rule;

It’s worth going in.
roublen vesseau, a frequent commenter here, has started pulling together a scratchpad for a “new liberalism”, and has a couple of pages of cut-and-paste and rough notes that just might shape up into something. Check out hard heads soft hearts; start reading at the bottom and be patient…you’ll walk away with at least five things that make you go “hmmm…”

In this column, Arianna Huffington…gosh, it’s amazing how she’s transformed herself…actually nails the ethical issues in modern corporate finance.
I actually need to dig into her stuff a bit and try and see what happened. Maybe we can make it contagious.
Her transformation into someone who I regularly believe makes lots of sense matches the counter-transformation of Lewis Lapham who has become a babbling idiot.
Is there some kind of Law Of Conservation of Sense?

…because there are more of us every year, in no small part. Ann Salisbury comments on Steve Lopez’s surprisingly intelligent column in today’s LAT.
I think this is another huge issue which won’t go away. I’m not living in fear of a Reconquista, but the impacts of massive population inflow combined with limited resources to build physical and social infrastructure presents some pretty big problems that need to be addressed.
I’ll try and jump in here a bit later.

Jeff Cooperdiscovers a truly stupid man in Boston Globe and MSNBC sports ‘columnist’ Rob Borges, who suggests that Lance Armstong isn’t an athlete.
I raced bicycles (a long time ago), and was lucky enough to be a suiveur (one of the guys in the cars) at the ’78 Tour (Hinault won, the riders went on strike, I got to have lunch with Eddy Merckx and Jacques Anquetil). These guys were riding up hills comparable to Sepulveda going north into the San Fernando Valley at over 23mph…
…and this moron thinks they aren’t athletes?

The bill, which has been vigorously opposed by consumer-rights groups, had long been the top legislative priority of credit card companies and some banks, which insist that many debtors abuse the bankruptcy laws to escape debts they should be able to pay. The companies sharply stepped up campaign contributions to members of Congress in recent years as they promoted the legislation.
Among the biggest beneficiaries would be the MBNA Corporation of Delaware, which describes itself as the world’s biggest independent credit card company. Ranked by employee donations, MBNA was the largest corporate contributor to President Bush’s 2000 campaign.
The company has also recently acknowledged that it gave a $447,000 debt-consolidation loan on what critics viewed as highly favorable terms to a crucial House supporter of the bill only four days before he signed on as a lead sponsor of the legislation in 1998. Both MBNA and the lawmaker, Representative James P. Moran Jr., Democrat of Virginia, have denied that there was anything improper about the loan.